Oct 30:5 Investments that can help spur a startup's growth

When you’re just starting out as a brand new company, resources are limited and what you choose to spend money on in the early stages can be crucial to the success of your business.

It is smart to do a little thinking beforehand to set your company up with a solid foundation for success.

Hire an in-house Marketer

As a founder you are already spreading yourself thin working with developers on your product, manage cashflow and fundraising so you don’t run out of money, roping in other team members to join the team, building out processes your team will eventually be carrying out on your behalf, along with all of your other duties.

From our experience, in the early stages of your company at least, bringing an in-house marketing person onto the team is a more cost effective ROI positive decision than hiring a marketing agency.

In-house people are immersed in your brand and product everyday. — It’s not just a brief understanding from a discovery call.

In-house team members don’t have another 6 clients to worry about dividing their attention among. — There only focus is your company and it’s success.

They cost less than an agency and in house team members typically will be able to be more productive too.

Many startups experience the same kind of things, where marketing agencies promise the world of results and growth to get you to become a customer.

They do a discovery call where they try to understand your business in a nutshell so they can start the job on their end.

The issue is that it requiresmore than a brief understandingto target the right customers.

More than a brief understanding of your product and customer to knock it out of the park when running paid advertisements, it takes almost the founder’s brain to really pinpoint the keywords that the business truly needs to rank for in a search engine ranking standpoint, and real traction driven by marketing efforts cannot be replicated by an agency alone if they are spreading themself thin among a myriad of clients.

But this isn’t to say that Agencies are ALWAYS bad for startups.. maybe just when they are resource limited and the agency overpromises.

Agencies are good, however, when you need subject matter guidance.

Say you hired a marketer in house but they aren’t super versed on paid ads; having an agency as a consultant can prove to be very beneficial to the team as long as your in-house marketer can execute and the agency’s consulting fees are reasonable.

To reiterate, it’s good to bring an in-house marketing team member to off-board more activities from the founder. Use an agency to guide the in-house marketer if they need to develop their skill set.

SEO Tool AHREFS

After being an avid user of the tool, I believe that AHREFS is a must-have for any startup company even if content isn’t your main acquisition channel.

Being able to understand the breakdown of your competitors organic traffic is crucial for the construction of your plan to capture marketshare and get customers.

Use Cases for Ahrefs include but aren’t limited to:

Competitive Monitoring of Paid Ad Copy in your Industry

Keyword Volume Statistics

In-depth keyword research for planning a content calendar

Keyword Ranking Monitoring of your site and competitors

Running SEO Audits of the company website

Content Idea Generation

See who is backlinking to certain pages (perfect for competitor blog posts to make a list of people to reach out too)

Find the most backlinked page on any URL

If you want your marketer to be able to make an impact early on, equipping them with a tool like AHREFS is going to help them carry out their day to day tasks and duties.

And yes, there are some free tools out there on the web that you can use to supplement your marketing efforts but it won’t leave your team with as much actionable data as a tool like AHREFS.

Typically once you try to use a free tool more than a few times they restrict access or limit features to force you to upgrade.

How much does AHREFS cost?

A basic subscription costs $99 a month and a standard subscription that has a few extra useful add ons which I recommend is $179 a month.

Why should I care about content strategy and building links?

It boosts your domain authority. Websites with higher domain authority have average Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs) and get more traffic to their pages from search queries.

Mentions from other websites in related industries generates an interest in your brand and website visits. All for free! Minus the time you put into writing the post and reaching out to the website editor.

The people who come from those websites linking to you are a possible customer if they make a purchase or become an MQL. Meaning that the more referral traffic coming from websites linking to you generates leads for your sales team to close on.

The more authoritative links you accrue, the bigger possibility other sites are willing to feature your stories, interview you, and promote your brand for free. Logic is pretty simple here, keep giving to the community and writing for people and more opportunities open up; which is all great and free marketing.

Solidifies the presence of your brand and when you decide prior on how you want your brand to be perceived, building links helps shape that customer perception! For Example: Want to be seen as trusted and secure? Build links from .gov and .edu websites. Get mentions from websites that are also highly trusted or considered academic by the public.

Hire a VP of Sales

Once your company has product market fit and have closed your seed round, it’s time to hire a VP of Sales.

The issue with the real rockstar salesperson is that they don’t want to come on for a low salary + equity.

Many of these VPs have a whole family to support and leaving their current job where they are making 6 figures is going to be not only risky, but just plain dumb if they take a significant pay cut for a company that doesn’t have a proven track record.

Which is why I’m reiterating that you should look to hire a VP of sales once you’ve closed your seed round.

Hiring the right person is going to take capital, you don’t need any junior person here.

This person should fire up your investors when you announce that they joined the team.

Also they should have years of experience selling a product just like this so when they join the team, selling should be as easy as phoning up their old clients and telling them to switch.

Criteria for hiring a VP of Sales

Has startup company experience

Years of experience in the same industry as you

Has experience scaling up sales teams quick (i.e. from 5–150 salespeople in a year)

Preferably has gone through 1 or 2 exits (shows that them scaling a sales team isn’t just a fluke)

Requires 6 figures to join the team (this shows they value their time and knows their worth)

Has a pipeline of previous clients they can convert to your product as they join the team

This isn’t really a position you can settle on. The adeptness of your VP of Sales is going to affect the livelihood of your company.

They need to be able to come on to your team and fine tune the sales process you’ve built as a base.

Having a consistent space where you can take your important investor meetings or your all hands on deck product launch meetings fueled by endless coffees to make those all nighter work sprints is going to set you up for success.

Not to mention being able to bounce ideas off other founders who could be going through the same thing as you, they might have experience you don’t have so they can help you out or provide cautionary tales from their own experiences.

Exclusive events coordinated by the staff and even free or discounted tickets to expensive industry functions

The events incubators and accelerators host typically are to benefit the people hosted in the program.

Expect experts from all walks of business to come in and share their insights, take notes as it’s not in every office where you can consistently get these kind of events.

Along with the occasional tickets to sales and marketing conferences that are expensive, you can use those tickets to send your team members and develop their skill sets!

Access to mentors from ideation, tech, marketing, sales, fundraising, finance, from professionals with heavily decorated careers who often have had multiple exits.

This is by far the biggest value I see in accelerator programs.

Being able to book a one hour 1 on 1 with people of this magnitude will help spur the growth of your startup more than anything.

The guidance these experts offer you while you’re going through the moves and motions of building your company will help keep you on pace and on track to grow as you need too.

Need I say more? The trajectory that a program like this offers startup companies can prove to be invaluable.

Conclusion

As a whole, the courage you need to have and risk you are taking going all in on building a company are very high.

The best thing you can do is to be smart and take advantage of the resources you have and make good ROI decisions at the right time.